President Barack Obama has lately been fulminating about people who want to look at the health care situation before being steamrollered into passing a bill. Ideas like forcing people to buy an approved health insurance plan or pay a fine, for example, are giving some of his supporters heart attacks. And the debate between those who insist we must include a "public option" and those who insist we must not include such an option is certain to prevent a broad agreement.
Well, this is the way things work under our Constitution.We have checks and balances to prevent anyone, including a President hell-bent on changing things, from accomplishing anything unless there is a broad consensus. It is not Mayor Daley's Chicago, where Obama got his political start!
And, really, thank God it is this way. We don't put through serious fundamental changes just because a President wants them. There are over 500 members of two houses of Congress that Pres. Obama will have to persuade (or at least persuade a majority of).
President Obama has to learn that he is not Mayor Daley. Even Lyndon Johnson, probably the most shilled President we have ever had at dealing with the Congress, took time getting his program through Congress, and this with a Congress that was trying to do right by the memory of the then-recently-assassinated John F. Kennedy.
Well, this is the way things work under our Constitution.We have checks and balances to prevent anyone, including a President hell-bent on changing things, from accomplishing anything unless there is a broad consensus. It is not Mayor Daley's Chicago, where Obama got his political start!
And, really, thank God it is this way. We don't put through serious fundamental changes just because a President wants them. There are over 500 members of two houses of Congress that Pres. Obama will have to persuade (or at least persuade a majority of).
President Obama has to learn that he is not Mayor Daley. Even Lyndon Johnson, probably the most shilled President we have ever had at dealing with the Congress, took time getting his program through Congress, and this with a Congress that was trying to do right by the memory of the then-recently-assassinated John F. Kennedy.
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